LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

An accordion-folded edition of the classic cautionary story, with deceptively simple cut-out illustrations on card stock that can be viewed in color or, reversed, as silhouettes.

The text—strictly an afterthought, printed in tiny type and so ill-fitting that the final passages spill out onto the rear cover—is Margaret Hunt’s 19th-century translation with Little Red-Cap’s name altered despite the fact that a cap is what she’s wearing in the pictures. Children will know how the story goes anyway, and they will have no trouble following along as the doll-like, apple-cheeked child meets a properly frightening black wolf with bright red teeth and is later devoured along with her grandmother. Because the pages of die-cut art are dead black on one side and white with red and black highlights on the other, not only are several layers visible at once, but the overlaps create ominous shadows and depths behind the figures. Moreover, though Sourdais leaves out explicit views of the wolf being cut open and, later, flensed by the “huntsman,” she does add a provocative note to the climactic bedside scene by stripping Little Red to her red-and-black polka-dot underclothes.

Bland at first glance, appropriately eerie and disquieting on closer examination.